The Senghor Myth
Once you've exhausted all the Negritude quotes, you have to confront the fact that Leopold Sedar Senghor ran Senegal as a repressive, one-party state.
Politics
I join my president to pray for my country
The misguided rhetoric of Tanzanian President John Magufuli guides the country's response to COVID-19.
Young, gifted, and pregnant
A series of social and political interventions are required to bring down Kenya’s startling teenage pregnancy statistics.
A nowhere space
In an agreement between the EU and African countries, refugees held at sea in the Mediterranean cannot claim rights to asylum. They are forever in limbo.
Global finance and charity killed African healthcare
What happened to the once universally accepted idea of healthcare for all?
The politics of sugar in Tanzania
Sugar has become the new gold in Tanzania as prices for the commodity soar and stocks vanish.
Place matters
If COVID-19 teaches us anything, it is that the virus has no boundaries, and the well-being of both rich and poor are co-dependent. What we do about that matters.
The class character of police violence
Police violence and the murder of black people in the United States have provoked outrage and protest around the world, including on the continent. But, why is there so little outrage over police violence in African countries?
We cannot reform ourselves out of the times we are in
To end racism, we will have to change the structures from which it draws its mandate, and get rid of liberal and right-wing politicians who give it oxygen while we are being asphyxiated.
What are courts for?
Why courts should not become a country’s sole moral arbiter, how the coronavirus impacted judicial processes in India and South Africa, and more.
The lesser of two evils
In Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, a partial COVID-19 lockdown has increased domestic violence, but women are not turning to shelters.
Whiteness in Southern Africa
Rethinking white societies in Southern Africa from the 1930s to the 1990s, particularly the region’s white workers and white poor and their relationship with white-ruled states.
Creating colonial Portugal in Africa
How colonial Portugal, to project the idea of a multi-continental and multiracial country, initiated a drive to encourage white settlement in Angola and Mozambique.
Uncovering ‘undesirable whites’ in the colonial archive
Can African scholars write different histories about settler societies—especially as Africans or Africanist scholars based in Africa or in the diaspora? The case of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) is instructive.
Working-class whiteness vs. the apartheid state
How did South Africa’s white working class—those close to the politicized black workforce—experience the reform of apartheid?
White mineworkers at Zambian Independence
Why did white mineworkers on the Zambian Copperbelt not seriously resist decolonization?
The cover up
A Kenyan investigative journalist reflects on the capture of a genocidaire in Paris after 26 years on the run and its significance to the families of the victims left in his wake.
Predisposed to chaos
What do we gain by exposing the material shortcomings of African health systems?
Financing Africa’s COVID-19 response
We need swift, bold, and decisive action on debt relief and monetary creation in Africa in order to face the coronavirus crisis and prevent many ordinary Africans from paying with their lives.
Ending the polarization around South Africa’s lockdown
In South Africa, we are not in a situation where we need to choose between saving lives and protecting livelihoods. It is far worse. We are in danger of losing both.